Episode
#64 What If God Is Evil? - Stephen Law
- Podcast
- The Uncertainty Podcast
- Published
- Dec 23, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 4781
- Processing state
not_requested
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-uncertainty-podcast-7089022/episodes/64-what-if-god-is-evil-stephen-law/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-uncertainty-podcast-7089022/64-what-if-god-is-evil-stephen-law.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
Stephen Law, professor of philosophy at Oxford, discusses his "evil god challenge" to theists: prove that God is not perfectly evil. That challenge, we will see, is surprisingly difficult to meet. Check out Stephen's paper outlining the evil-god challenge, as well as Mooney and Hendricks paper critiquing the challenge. To support the channel, do please oh please consider donating via PayPal or Buy Me a Coffee . Do please follow me Twitter . EPISODE CHAPTERS 00:00:00 Introduction 00:00:06 The evil-god challenge 00:11:03 The versions of the challenge 00:17:02 Does the moral argument break the parallel? 00:24:28 Skeptical theism will not undercut the challenge 00:34:07 Does skeptical theism lead to skepticism about everything? 00:46:30 The neutral-god challenge 00:53:13 Theodicies won't undercut the challenge, either 00:59:39 Would Jesus' resurrection break the parallel? 01:07:57 Is an evil god logically incoherent? 01:16:47 What are you most uncertain about? Get full access to Miles K. Donahue at mileskdonahue.substack.com/subscribe